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Round One
Virginia Woolf on Rose MacaulayRose_macaulay.jpg
 "Rose Macaulay dined here last week - something like a lean sheep-dog in appearance - harum-scarum-humble - too much of a professional, yet just on the intellectual side of the border. Might be religious though; mystical perhaps. Not at all dominating or impressive; I daresay she observes more than one thinks. Clear, pale, mystical eyes. A kind of faded beauty; oh badly dressed."
-- Virginia Woolf, diary entry (18th February 1921)

 

Round Two
Barbara Pym on Denton Welch

"A Denton Welch in every room/kills Ethnographic survey gloom."

[Pym included this couplet in her copy of Welch's
A Voice Through a Cloud.]

 

Round Three
Rebecca West on Glenway Wescott

"There was a small boy who loved his grandmother so much that when he grew up he wrote a book about a small boy who loved his grandmother so much that when he grew up he wrote a book..."

 

 

 

THE FOLDED

 

LEAF

 

William Maxwell, circa 1945

 

William Maxwell's beautiful and supremely moving third novel, The Folded Leaf, was published by Harper & Brothers in 1945, when the author was 37. His first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, was published in 1934, but Maxwell subsequently disowned this book and it has never been republished. Maxwell's second novel, They Came Like Swallows, followed in 1937. This was the first of Maxwell's books to deal with the death of his mother (she died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, when Maxwell was ten years old), a subject Maxwell obsessively returns to throughout his long career.

 

Faber & Faber, 1946 

A British edition of The Folded Leaf was published in 1946 by Faber & Faber, and the text, although reset to form a smaller book (275 pages versus the original 309), is identical to the original Harper's edition.

 

Forum Books, 1956


In 1956, Forum Books, a division of The World Publishing Company which apparently re-published "distinguished best-sellers you will want to read and own...in beautifully bound, unabridged editions at a modest price," issued a re-packaged version of The Folded Leaf. The jacket graphic has been changed from the symbolic illustration on the Harper's edition, which somewhat murkily juxtaposes -- or overlays -- several key images from the book, to a rather crude and very literal 50s illustration of two boys. (Both these illustrations are unsigned and uncredited; Maxwell's daughter, Brookie, provided illustrations for many of his subsequent books.)

 

Harper & Brothers, 1945


Contrary to Forum Books' assertion that the editions it publishes are "unabridged," this 1956 edition of The Folded Leaf is most definitely and interestingly abridged: the final chapter of the book is missing. This brief (five pages) chapter 62 moves the book forward from spring to summer; the reader is told that Lymie's "scars are almost healed," and that there is "a peculiar lightness in his step." Maxwell goes on to state that Lymie has "left his childhood (or if not all, then the greater part of it) behind..." It is hard to imagine a more overtly conclusive ending to a coming-of-age novel, and it is this ending that has disappeared from the 1956 Forum Books edition, and every edition published thereafter.

 

Vintage Books, 1959

The Folded Leaf now concludes with chapter 61, but the copyright page in this Vintage edition from 1959 announces that "For this edition certain slight revisions have been made by the author." The novel ends not with a conclusion but an interruption: "It was some time before the nurse came in and put an end to this childish game." This single sentence conveys everything included in the vanished Chapter 62, but conveys it with the subtle heart-rending grace that Maxwell is famous for.